Sarawak just contracted 250MW of solar, and it starts with earthworks

reNIKOLA Gedong Solar (Sarawak) signed a 30 year power purchase agreement with Syarikat Sesco on 17 September 2026, for a solar farm at Gedong in the Simunjan district of Samarahan. The plant will put 250MWac onto the Sarawak grid from up to 363MWp of installed panels, and the investment is put at about RM1 billion. Sesco is wholly owned by Sarawak Energy, so the offtaker is the state utility.

It was signed in Kuching, where Sarawak Energy sent its group chief executive Datuk Haji Sharbini and its legal and compliance head George Chapman. reNIKOLA Gedong was represented by its executive chairman Dato' Posa Bin Majais and its director Adel Boumhidi.

What the project actually is

363MWp of modules feeding 250MWac of grid output is a DC to AC ratio of about 1.45, which is high and deliberate. Oversizing holds the inverters at full output for more of the day and flattens the delivery curve the offtaker is buying for thirty years. It also means about a third more modules, structure and DC cable than the headline 250MW suggests, and the programme is sized on the larger number.

The joint venture is reNIKOLA (Sarawak), Punggor Wibawa and Gedong Solar Park Industry. The stakes and the land area have not been published.

Where it sits in the timeline

A signed PPA is the gate that makes financing possible. It is not a notice to proceed. Neither party has published a construction start or a commercial operation date, so the hiring window is not fixed.

What is fixed is the queue in front of it. Sesco signed a 30 year PPA with Zecon in October 2025 for 100MWac of agrivoltaics at Kota Petra, and Zecon awarded the RM328 million EPCC contract in July 2026, with commercial operation due by 31 December 2027. Ibraco signed for another 100MW in June 2026. Gedong is the third and the largest, which puts roughly 450MWac of contracted solar against the 1,500MW by 2030 the Premier's office set out at SNEC in Shanghai in June 2025. Sarawak is roughly a third of the way there on paper, and none of it is generating yet.

What it will take to build

Look at what Zecon bought for its RM328 million: the solar plant, the grid connection, extensive site preparation and earthworks, and a 130 metre bridge across the Serai River. The modules are the fast, predictable part of a Sarawak solar build, and the schedule is won or lost on access, ground and grid.

So the early demand is civil. Site engineers, earthworks and drainage, geotechnical, piling supervision, surveyors, planners who can hold a linear earthworks programme through a wet season. On a 363MWp footprint the foundations run to tens of thousands of piles, and the rate they go in is the rate the job moves at.

The electrical phase is where the market is thin. High voltage substation and grid connection engineers, protection and control, and commissioning engineers who have taken a utility scale plant through grid code compliance are scarce regionally, and Sarawak has had few large solar plants for people to learn on. Solar QA/QC is its own discipline, not general E&I: module handling, torque verification, string testing, thermographic survey.

There is a staffing constraint that peninsular contractors routinely underestimate. Sarawak runs its own immigration. A Malaysian from Kuala Lumpur or Sabah needs a Sarawak work pass, one issued elsewhere in Malaysia does not carry, and since 1 November 2025 employment pass applications go through a separate platform. That is lead time on the critical path, not paperwork, and it lands hardest on commissioning specialists who arrive late and are needed at once.

No jobs figure has been published for Gedong. Dato' Posa said the project would generate "employment opportunities, local procurement and the development of local capabilities" across its lifecycle, a commitment with no number attached. The nearest official ratio is the federal LSS6 tender, where the energy ministry expects up to 20,000 job opportunities across 2,500MW of solar and 1,250MW of storage in development and construction. That is about eight per megawatt, putting a 250MW build near 2,000 positions. LSS6 is a peninsular programme and Sarawak is not part of it, so read that as an order of magnitude, not a forecast.

What we are watching

The EPCC award, because that is when hiring starts and it will show whether the work goes to a Sarawak contractor as Zecon's did. A commercial operation date, which would fix the window. And whether reNIKOLA's two programmes collide. Gedong is its first project in Sarawak, and it was also shortlisted for 618MWp at Kemaman in Terengganu under LSS5+, due to commission by the end of 2027. The same commissioning and high voltage people are wanted on both sides of the South China Sea at once.

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